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By:

Reeva Sakaria

8 November 2025 at 3:04:18 pm

How transport systems make urban life easier

Did you know Mumbai commuters lose hundreds of hours every year not in distance, but in delays, waiting, and uncertainty. In Mumbai, commuting can feel like a challenge, but technology is quietly changing that. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) are helping people navigate the city more efficiently by combining real-time data, adaptive routing, and smart coordination across trains, metros, monorails, buses, and last-mile options. At the forefront of this transformation is Yatri, Mumbai’s...

How transport systems make urban life easier

Did you know Mumbai commuters lose hundreds of hours every year not in distance, but in delays, waiting, and uncertainty. In Mumbai, commuting can feel like a challenge, but technology is quietly changing that. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) are helping people navigate the city more efficiently by combining real-time data, adaptive routing, and smart coordination across trains, metros, monorails, buses, and last-mile options. At the forefront of this transformation is Yatri, Mumbai’s official local app. Using ITS, Yatri shows the best combination of transport modes in real time, provides accurate live locations of trains and metros, and even enables smart, easy metro ticketing via QR codes. The result: a commute that’s no longer an uncertain experience, but a predictable, stressfree journey. It’s 8:20 a.m., and you have a 9:30 a.m. meeting in BKC, at a place you’ve never been to before. You pause for a moment, weighing your options. Do you risk sitting in traffic in a cab, watching the minutes tick by, or take a train and hope you don’t miss it by a minute? Will one small delay early in the journey quietly snowball into being late? This familiar moment of hesitation is something countless commuters in Mumbai experience every single day. In a city like ours, peak-hour travel is rarely linear. A route that looks manageable on a map can quietly stretch from under an hour to well over 80 minutes, with average speeds during rush hour dropping to 10–15 km/h on key corridors. Over time, I’ve noticed how commuters adapt: leaving earlier than necessary, padding schedules with buffers, mentally preparing for delays, carrying the cognitive load of uncertainty long before the journey even begins. What often goes unnoticed is how strong Mumbai’s public transport network already is. Every day, local trains carry nearly 7 million people across the city. Metros cut through peak-hour chaos with steady, reliable travel times. Buses, autorickshaws, skywalks, and short walks quietly take care of the last mile. But in real life, the challenge isn’t availability—it’s coordination. When commuters are forced to mentally stitch together trains, buses, metros, and walking routes without reliable information, they default to what feels familiar rather than what’s efficient. Take a common rush-hour commute from Lower Parel to Andheri East. By road alone, this journey can easily take 75–90 minutes on a bad day as traffic slows unpredictably. But when modes are combined, walking to Lower Parel station, taking a local train to Andheri, switching to the metro, and finishing with a short walk, the trip often takes just 45–55 minutes. That’s a time saving of 30–40 minutes per trip. Over a five-day workweek, that adds up to 2.5 - 3 hours; over a year, more than 100 hours reclaimed, time that would otherwise be lost to waiting, guesswork, and congestion. According to a report by The Times of India, using real-time data and adaptive routing, intelligent transport systems can cut commute times by 30–40% and reduce congestion hours by up to 35%. Cities around the world that have adopted ITS are already seeing the impact: fewer hours wasted inching through traffic, and more time getting where people need to be. What excites me most is how commuters themselves are becoming part of the solution. An overcrowded train, a signal failure, or a last-minute platform change often unfolds in real time through shared updates. On Yatri chat, people flag delays, confirm train arrivals, and alert fellow travellers before official announcements. This two-way flow, where technology is strengthened by human insights, creates a living, responsive network rather than a static schedule. Yatri brings journey planning, metro ticketing, live train locations, and real-time travel information into a single platform, helping commuters navigate efficiently across local trains, metros, monorails, buses, and last-mile options without guesswork. By combining intelligent transport systems with real-time updates from both technology and fellow travellers, journeys become predictable, stress-free, and under control, making cities feel smaller, connections closer, and everyday life just a little easier to navigate. The writer is a co-founder of Yatri. Views personal.)

Irresponsible Dissent

There are moments when politics must yield to the national interest. The India AI Impact Summit was one such occasion. Instead, it was disfigured by a juvenile spectacle that saw members of the Indian Youth Congress barging into an exhibition hall at Bharat Mandapam, shedding their shirts, shouting slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.


The summit was an international forum attended by delegates from 110 countries, showcasing India’s technological ambitions at a time when artificial intelligence is fast becoming the new measure of national power. It featured 326 exhibitors from 37 countries, CEOs from 41 global technology firms, investment commitments reportedly touching $250bn, and exhibitions of 644 AI technologies. Three indigenous large language models were unveiled, signalling that India now aspires not merely to consume AI but to shape it.


Against this backdrop, the Youth Congress’s juvenile antics was a reckless act of self-inflicted damage to the country’s interests. It also helps further discredit the Congress party led by Rahul Gandhi.


More than a hundred senior academics have said as much in a strongly worded collective statement. They called the protest “regrettable” and “ill-conceived,” warning that it risked undermining India’s carefully built credibility in advanced technologies.  Turning an international technology summit into a stage for domestic theatrics betrays a failure to grasp both context and consequence.


Protest is the lifeblood of a democracy. But not all venues are interchangeable. There are a hundred ways to protest elsewhere without converting a global platform into a spectacle of indiscipline. Elected representatives, and those who aspire to be, have a constitutional obligation not to cheapen moments that project the country to the world.


More troubling than the stunt itself has been the silence that followed. Rahul Gandhi has found his voice on everything from foreign wars to street-corner skirmishes. On this occasion, he has said nothing. Nor has the party issued anything resembling a serious apology or explanation.


That silence feeds a deeper malaise. For years, a section of India’s political and intellectual left has cultivated a habit of selective outrage by making it a point to disparage every global engagement under Modi and dub every national achievement as propaganda. When such ceaseless criticism begins to echo the narratives pushed by adversarial states such as China or Pakistan, it ceases to be merely oppositional and becomes strategically careless.


The scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and university researchers who built the AI ecosystem on display at the summit do not belong to any party. Their work represents a collective national investment. If the Youth Congress chose this significant moment to vandalise, then it has only managed to discredit its own party in the eyes of the people.


If the Congress aspires to govern again, it must decide whether it wants to be seen as a serious alternative power, or merely a running commentary on Modi. Nations rise on competence and confidence. Oppositions, too, are judged by the same standard.

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